Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has been hit with a class-action lawsuit in California federal court by three authors who say it misused their books and hundreds of thousands of others to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.
The complaint, filed on Monday by writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, said that Anthropic used pirated versions of their works and others to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. An attorney for the authors declined to comment.
The lawsuit joins several other high-stakes complaints filed by copyright holders including visual artists, news outlets and record labels over the material used by tech companies to train their generative artificial intelligence systems.
Separate groups of authors have sued OpenAI and Meta Platforms over the companies’ alleged misuse of their work to train the large-language models underlying their chatbots.
The case filed Monday is the second against Anthropic following a lawsuit brought by music publishers last year over its alleged misuse of copyrighted song lyrics to train Claude.
